


A Simple Remedy

by annaslastdalliance



Series: Hans and Anna do caretaking [2]
Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: (Note the explicit tag refers to references more than actual acts here), (See the previous tag about references only), As-yet unexplained AUs, Caretaking, Emotional D/s, F/M, Gen, Minor Illness, Objectification, Oral Sex, Ownership, The healthiest Hans/Anna I will ever write but still not exactly healthy, sexual discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23079685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annaslastdalliance/pseuds/annaslastdalliance
Summary: Anna hasn’t been awake for more than ten minutes before Hans is standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, framed by lamplight and frowning.“Come on,” he says, and there’s a sharpness to his tone that makes her scramble her way to sitting. “There’s no use lying there coughing; let’s see if we can’t find a tonic to give us both some peace.”Anna is sick, and Hans takes care of her. In the process, he has an idea.
Relationships: Anna/Hans (Disney)
Series: Hans and Anna do caretaking [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658737
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	A Simple Remedy

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I am still writing this ship in the year of our lord 2020, but here I am, still thinking about these two idiots. 
> 
> This is set in the same verse as "holding my chin up," but you don't have to have read that one to read this! Heads up, though: this escalates the mild D/s of that fic to straight up D/s and - content warning for any sex-averse folks - wanders a little further away from that "gen" tag and into the realm of something more sexual between them (even if nothing actually transpires...yet). That said, I've kept the "gen" tag for now, since this doesn't actually involve any sex acts, and while it is deeply romantic, it's also deeply emotional, and can still (I hope) be enjoyed as such.

Anna hasn’t been awake for more than ten minutes before Hans is standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, framed by lamplight and frowning.

“Come on,” he says, and there’s a sharpness to his tone that makes her scramble her way to sitting. “There’s no use lying there coughing; let’s see if we can’t find a tonic to give us both some peace.”

Anna slips out of bed and over to the door, half-asleep but instinctively obedient. Her head is swimming from sudden verticality; Hans steadies her by the arm at the threshold, and then doesn’t let go.

“You should have come to me,” he says as they cross the hall, Anna in her bedsocks and Hans in his slippers, “as soon as it went on for any length.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Anna says, carefully, around the twinge of her throat. Sleeplessness and sickness have magnified her shame, and her voice comes out sounding small. “But I guess I did anyway.”

She can feel Hans watching her for a moment, considering, before he pushes open a door and ushers her ahead of him.

“Never mind, Anna; it’s done now. Light the candle and pass it to me, please, while I find the medicine chest.”

In darkness, Anna feels around for the standing lamp; finds it and lights it in the mouth of the dimming fireplace. The room comes into hazy view in the candlelight: a square wooden table, lined with long benches, and cabinets and bookshelves in every corner, throwing shadows like ink spills. Hans holds out a hand to her for the lamp, before moving over to the cabinet by the door and beginning to rifle it with a brisk efficiency that suggests he’s been awake far longer than she thought. The light follows him like a halo. Anna waits on the bench at the table, trying not to cough, poking around the scratch of her throat and mouth with her tongue. Now that she’s no longer lying down, the desire to cough is oddly diminished, but she can feel it waiting for her every time she swallows; sense it in the ache of her head when she turns it too quickly.

Luckily, it doesn’t take Hans long to find what he’s looking for. Coming back to the table, he lifts a small mahogany chest onto the surface and pulls it open. Anna peers under his elbow as he frees a bottle from its grip, inspects the handwritten label in the candlelight, and then replaces it.

“Here, this will do.” Hans’s fingers have alighted on a bottle with the single recognisable word _linctus_ , and Anna watches in silence as he slips it from its velvet groove, works the lid, and carefully measures out a spoonful of the liquid. “All in one go, please.”

Anna lets him slide the spoon between her teeth and regrets it immediately. “Uhgr, Hans, this is _disgusting_.”

“No doubt.” He’s measuring out a second dose without pause, and after a moment of internal struggle, Anna swallows this one, too.

“Seriously, this is worse than cod liver oil.”

“I believe you,” Hans says, with a trace of amusement now, and this time, he does pause before proffering her third dosage. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me, Anna?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” he says, with a private smile, and tilts the bottle again. “Last one.”

She drinks it and pulls a face for him, keen to show the effort of her obedience. 

“Are you sure this is medicine? And not, say…poison?”

“I suppose that would be one way to stop your coughing, but it wasn’t the one I had in mind. Alright, Anna; back to bed.”

His tone brooks no discussion, and certainly no dispute. Hans pulls her to standing by the wrists and then leaves her there, waiting, as he packs away the medicine chest. Once he is done, he sets the lamp on the table and turns to the mantle to unearth a douter. Then room dims again suddenly in a coil of smoke, and then they are out in the hallway again, walking.

“You’ve stopped coughing,” he observes in an undertone as they climb the staircase back to the sleeping quarters.

It isn’t like him, to be redundant. Anna shakes out of her reverie to swallow carefully. “I-I think so. My throat still hurts…but it isn’t tickling quite so much, maybe?”

In response, Hans pulls them to a stop in the hallway to press a palm against her forehead and cheeks. His hand feels cool and soft, and Anna resists leaning in only barely, steadied by Hans’s grip on her elbow. He doesn’t speak. Then they are walking again, passing Hans’s bedroom, oaken door still slightly open, and Hans pauses and waits, expectantly. Anna looks at it: the warm, ember-tinged dark of the gap between wall and door, and takes a step forward.

“Can I—?” she begins, and she doesn’t have to finish before Hans is opening the door wider and ushering her under his arm:

“Yes, I think you had better.”

There’s something about this entrance—skirting in under the sweep of Hans’s sleeve—that makes her feel even smaller. It’s not unwelcome. Hans’s chambers are still in darkness; only the faintest glow of orange left in the ashes of the fireplace, and the bed is a charcoal outline in the black. Anna fumbles towards it with an uncertain footfall as Hans closes the door behind them, and it doesn’t take her long to collide with something.

“O-ouch!”

Hans makes a sound of asperity from somewhere behind her. “Stand still and let me find you.” In a moment he has, fitting his fingers around her wrists as though he thinks she might wander off. “Are you hurt?”

“...just stubbed my toe.”

“Are you cold?”

She hadn’t noticed until he asked, but he can clearly feel her shivering.

“Well, not really—”

“Stay here, and for god’s sake, stand still. I’ll stoke the fire.”

“N-no, don’t…don’t leave me—”

She doesn’t need to be able to see to know Hans’s expression.

“Anna, you’re being ridiculous. I don’t want you getting even sicker over…idiotic sentiment.”

“I won’t,” Anna says, and lets herself lean in then, full-bodied against him. Hans takes a step back, almost instinctive, before he steadies, and his arms creep slowly around her back. She feels rather than hears his sigh this time; the rise and fall of his warm, beating chest. “You’ll…you’ll keep me warm—won’t you?”

“Alright,” he says, and he sounds tired, but not tired with her, and that is something. “Come along, dear. To bed.”

They cross to the bed together clumsily, toe-treading, and fall into it more than climb. Finally supine, Hans kicks off his slippers and somehow manoeuvres them both under the blankets without sitting up. Guiltily, Anna wonders how long she’d kept him awake with her coughing. She reaches beneath the covers, sideways, until the back of her hand comes into contact with something, soft material overlaying a warm curve interrupted by bone: the stretch of his side, the bottom of his ribs. She stops and retreats; rests her fingers on the bed beside this spot, a touch less about intent than proximity.

“Sorry,” she says. With anyone else, she could trust the back of her knuckles to say it, but it’s Hans, and he prefers words; prefers the way it sometimes hurts Anna a little, the effort of speaking. “I really didn’t mean…I didn’t mean to keep you up.”

“I’m well aware it wasn’t intentional,” Hans says after a moment, shortly. His voice is tired and distant; she can tell he is facing away from her, and hasn’t turned. “Do you intend to make it up to me by keeping me up now?”

Anna swallows. _Hare_ -brained, of _course_ , how _stupid_ — “No. Sorry.”

She imagines his sigh, fogged breath unfurling in the darkness. “Go to sleep, Anna. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

He is not talking about her throat, but he hasn’t said that he forgives her, and the two are not so easily confused that she can miss it. Anna closes her eyes and waits as her heart slows and her breathing evens. The room is silent, fire in the grate now burned so low it’s renounced any youthful sputtering. Eventually, despite everything, Anna’s thoughts begin to tangle: images growing so hot behind her eyelids that for a moment, she believes she is dreaming. Then she shifts and the night extends like a river, dark and flowing. Anna burrows deeper into the pillows, chasing relief with her cheek.

“I know that I’m…I’m mostly just a bother to you.” She’s on her back now, an indeterminate stretch of time later, room so dark she doesn’t know if her eyes are open or closed. “But still, I…”

She doesn’t expect him to answer, but when he does it is crisp and unmuddied, as though he’s also been lying awake, watching his thoughts race like paper boats. “You?”

“I _love_ you.”

The admission shakes a sigh from her first, and then something like a sob: eyes squeezing shut, mouth puckered. It’s not the first time she’s said it, and it won’t be the last, but in the moment, she is so small and tired and lost that the enormity of the emotion suddenly hurts. Her heart feels open, like a wound, but she doesn’t want to close it so much as take it out in offering.

“I know—I _know_ it’s not enough, but it’s—it’s all I—”

“I know,” Hans interrupts, and he rolls to face her at last, and presses her against him, one hand on the small of her back. The way she’d leant into him earlier; the way he had liked, and refused to admit.

“I know,” he repeats, “and that is all I require of you, Anna, do you hear me? It’s all I want. Nothing else; you probably wouldn’t be quite so equipped.”

Anna hiccoughs a laugh, muffled against the lapels of Hans’s nightshirt. Yes, she _is_ good at this bit, isn’t she? The feeling and hurting bit; the bit he struggles with.

“I’d be terrible at it, probably,” she admits. “Whatever it was. I’m not good at much else.”

“Much else isn’t what I want. _Need_. This is; the sum of it. You—” a pause; Hans burrowing even closer; lips slightly damp beneath her ear. “You are.”

He sounds strange, somehow, and not only for the things he is saying. Overheated. Anna shivers and presses closer, and Hans presses back: fits her chin over his shoulder and breathes against the crease of her neck. He’s not like this, not usually: affectionate sometimes, but never compulsive, never unthinking. It takes her a moment to realise the difference. Before, his affection had been practiced, for her benefit. Now, he is acting selfishly. The thought sends a shudder through her, a little bolt of breathlessness, like dipping her toes in the fjord at the end of winter. Hans must feel the movement, because he pulls back from her slightly. 

“There we are. Feeling calmer?”

 _No_ , the answer is _no_ , but whatever she’s feeling is at war with her capacity for speech. She presses against him again, and then again, and eventually feels him shift as though in answer. His body feels warm against hers: warm and firm in all the places she is neither.

“Anna...”

She knows that tone. Her eyes are hot and sticky when she opens them, only partially with fever.

“W-what is it?”

“Anna, stop it. We both need rest. _You_ need rest.”

“Well, m-maybe, but I—”

“ _No_ ,” he insists, and when she keeps moving, she feels his long fingers climb the curve of her hip beneath the covers and then settle around it, grounding. If there’s a smile on his face, she can’t hear it as he continues: “ _Rest_. For both of us. Now.”

“Alright,” Anna breathes. The word ends on a cough, half-stifled, and Anna rolls onto her back again, moving their bodies reluctantly out of their disjointed alignment. In this position, they can no longer push and pull and shift, but Hans’s arm is still a long strip of warmth across her chest that rises and falls with her breathing, like a pile of books that she’s fallen asleep with. So anchored, Anna finds sleep coming on more quickly. She can hear Hans’s breathing: counts the seconds between the sounds, learning his rhythm. Only now does it occur to her, a thought like water rippling, how conspicuous and unsettling its earlier absence had been. Anna sleeps.

In the morning, she wakes up to the salty tang of her own skin, her mouth in odd communion with the jutting bone of her wrist. The light in the room is golden and bright, a sharp coolness to the room that tells her that it’s endured a recent airing. Sluggishly, Anna wonders if she should be offended; if Hans does this every morning, or only after she’s shared a bed with him.

“Ah, you’re awake; good. Sit up and wipe your mouth; I want to talk to you before I leave.”

Sheepishly, Anna does he suggests, scrubbing apologetically at her face with the back of her hand as she blinks sleep out of her eyes. Her throat hurts; her head swims briefly before it settles as she straightens to sitting. It takes a long, undignified moment, and while Anna fully expects to find Hans returned to his writing, or his tidying, or one of the other equally fastidious, business-like operations with which he occupies his mornings by the time she’s done—she instead finds him watching her, expression contemplative and uncharacteristically unrepulsed by the spittle she can feel drying like badly applied powder on her cheeks. He looks like he’s been awake for hours, crisp and unmussed, green eyes clear and steady.

“Did you know that you chewed the corner of my pillow last night, while you slept?”

Anna shakes her head, still silent. She glances guiltily down, to the small patch of what she’d assumed was sweat marring the creaseless egg-blue of the pillowcase.

“First my pillow; then my shoulder. Finally, you moved onto your own arm, it appears.” A small smile finds its way into the corner of Hans’s mouth, even more startling than finding him still in his chambers, waiting for her to wake on a day he hasn’t explicitly set aside for the purpose. “Is this a cry for help of some kind, Anna? Have you been finding the portions too small at dinner?”

“No…” Anna’s too sleepy to rise to Hans’s teasing, swaying side-to-side as she tries to keep her eyes open and unblinking. Then he is sitting beside her atop the coverlet, an arm around her shoulders to hold her steady, and focusing becomes easier. 

“How’s your cough?”

From Hans, such a question is neither rhetorical nor a pleasantry. Anna takes a moment to swallow and clear her throat experimentally, while Hans takes her fever with the back of his free hand. 

“Alright, I think. Better.” Hans’s face, so close to hers now, tilts, and Anna continues hastily: “A bit _sore_ still maybe, but…on the mend. Definitely!”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Hans disagrees, sternly, and he takes her chin in his free hand, tugging her mouth open and peering inside. Blushing, Anna pulls against his grip until Hans lets go, apparently satisfied. “Hmm. Well, your fever’s down, but another dose of tincture wouldn’t go amiss, all the same.”

The mere suggestion makes her feel slightly ill, and Anna struggles to keep the reaction from her face. “Is that right?” she asks carefully instead, bumping his shoulder with her own. “Are you a physician now, on top of everything?”

She means it to be teasing in turn, an attempt to buy time more than anything, but to her surprise, the bridge of Hans’s nose pinkens. His voice is stiff when he speaks. “I have some cursory training, yes.”

Curiosity distracts her, briefly. “Cursory training? How come?”

Hans doesn’t meet her eyes. “In the navy. Not all ships can accommodate a physician—and even if they do, there’s no guarantee he’ll still be breathing by the time he’s needed. Now, are you quite done trying to distract me? Will you sit still and let me get the medicine chest, or do I need to tie you up with the bedsheets?”

It’s an idle threat, Anna knows—and one of the kind Hans has made before—but this time, the words stick. She lets Hans rise without protesting; is still thinking of sailor’s knots and long white fingers when he returns and the bed dips.

“Here.” The dreaded tincture comes out again, a bottle Hans holds between two knuckles as he closes the chest again and replaces it on the floor, as though he doesn’t trust her to hold it. It occurs to her that he’s right, probably: now that she’s no longer half-asleep and delirious from coughing, the urge to throw the vile thing out the window might be too much to resist. “No arguments today Anna, please. I don’t have time for it this morning.”

With grudging obedience, Anna opens her mouth and lets him slip the spoon between her teeth. Too late, she remembers exactly why she’s been dreading this.

“ _Uhrg_ ,” she spits after swallowing, with difficulty. “Hans, that is—it’s truly terrible; have you _tried_ it? Maybe it’s soured and needs replacing; there’s no way something that tastes like _that_ is really meant for drinking, let alone _healing_ —”

Hans rolls his eyes, pouring a second dose for her with a steady hand. This time, she takes it with her eyes squeezed shut, resisting the urge to hold her nose only barely. “See?” Hans says, only half-mocking as she pulls back, “I knew you were capable of acting your age if you put your mind to it.”

The sound of her swallow is suddenly deafening. Hans doesn’t mean anything by it, probably. Or he means it the way it had sounded only: belittling, fond, exasperated, intimate. Not as a dismissal. Not as a disavowal, a repudiation of desire and complicity. Still, Anna hears both things, and this time, when the words stick in her head, they are a sharp-edged thing for the handling.

Beside her, Hans has poured out the third and final dose of tincture and is proffering it expectantly. His eyes still meet hers when she looks at him, but his mind is obviously, painstakingly far away, past this moment and into the next. Is she so malleable then, so predictable? Last night he’d said _want_ first, twice, before _need_. For the first time since they’d begun their arrangement, seeing through the evasion doesn’t make it hurt any less.

“Yes, I am.” With difficulty, Anna makes her voice even; neither belligerent nor pleading. “I’m capable of holding a spoon for myself, too, in case you’re wondering.”

“Excuse me?”

She pulls back from him properly, finally, getting sufficient distance to meet his eyes without blurring.

“You seemed to want me _act my age_ , that’s all. And if that’s—if that’s what you _want_ —” she leans on the word, deliberately. “—then I can do it. Obviously.”

There’s a tense moment as Hans just stares at her and Anna stares back, trying not to shrink instinctively. At last, Hans sighs, and turns away from her for a moment to replace the tincture and set the spoon on the nightstand. When he turns back, his face is etched in cautious patience, wilfully layered over a foundation of clear exasperation.

“And that has now upset you for some reason,” he says slowly, when she meets his eyes, “even though you’ve never objected overmuch before. Very well, Anna. If you’d like to tell me something, I’ll need you to speak plainly; I’m neither a soothsayer nor a two-penny charlatan, and I won’t play at guessing.”

It’s an unexpectedly reasonable request, and some of Anna’s righteous determination deflates and flounders. Suddenly, she is the one struggling to articulate what she wants, and the irony doesn’t go unnoticed.

“It’s just…I thought…” She stops, swallows past the pain in her throat and chest, and starts again. “I thought you _wanted_ this. But…but if you _don’t_ , if I’m just…” She makes a gesture meant to express the inexpressible— _embarrassing myself? Wasting your time?_ She can’t bear to put words to either of them. “Well, then, if you had any _decency_ left, you could at least tell me, instead of—instead of pretending to _like_ it when I let you boss me around—”

“ _Let_ me—” Hans interrupts, tone incredulous, and when he continues, a little disgust has edged into his voice as well: “Please, Anna, don’t deceive yourself. When you came to me, you wanted this so badly you could barely _breathe_ without it.”

It’s true, and she can’t deny it, but it flares anger through her anyway: the way he holds up her weaknesses, the ones she offered him freely, and needles her with them.

“Well, what about _you_ then? You can pretend all you like that this is some great _hardship_ , that the only thing you’re getting out of this is an even _bigger_ head than the one you’re sporting currently, but—”

This time, he doesn’t interrupt her; doesn’t need to. Hans’s eyes are narrow and dark, and his mind now so fully, fixedly on the present that his focus seems to thicken the air. His arm comes back around her shoulders, the way it had earlier, but this time, instead of gripping the top of her arm, he lets his hand rest at the slope of her neck, over the small patch of skin revealed by her neckline.

“ _But_?” Hans prompts, slowly. “But in fact, I am getting…what, exactly, out of this? Our…arrangement?” He makes the word sound dangerous, dropping his voice lower and leaning in close, forehead just shy of her temple. “Tell me what you imagine, Anna, and I’ll tell you if you’re close to the mark.”

Everything inside her trips over itself when she tries to speak.

“I-I don’t—”

“Know?” Hans fills in, helpfully. “Ah, but you know what you _imagine_ , don’t you? Allow me to rephrase the question: what is it, exactly, that you imagine I feel, when you… _let me_ …‘boss you around’?”

“I don’t know—that’s why I’m _asking_ —”

It doesn’t seem to matter. He’s fully dressed, of course, boots and cravat and jacket and all, but he leans into her, over her, far enough to make every starched layer at his waist crease. Anna can smell his aftershave, the tang of bear fat in his hair, the florid perfume of his laundry.

“Do you know what _I_ imagined, this morning? Watching you suckling on my pillow in your sleep? I wondered if there wasn’t a better use your mouth could be put to. And I don’t mean your usual yammering or chewing your fingernails down to the quick.”

Anna shudders, suddenly can’t breathe. Even the words are too much, and she closes her eyes and feels her cheeks heat. It’s not what she imagined, not at all, though a part of her had wanted it without quite knowing its shape. She thinks now of the ceaseless shift of his hips the previous evening, the way he’d stilled her and made her roll away from him. For all that Anna is a stranger to this—has never touched between her legs save by accident or in cleaning—she is not completely innocent. She has reads books; she has had dreams: all this to the extent that she had come to suspect that the reality, like so many realities, would be disappointing, and settled into incuriosity. Now, however, _curiosity_ seems like a soft word to describe what she is feeling.

“Anna,” Hans breathes beside her, and waits until she opens her eyes again. “Alright?”

Somehow, she nods.

“Good,” he says, crisply, and he pushes her sleep-matted fringe up and off her forehead and all the places it sticks. Is this his usual seduction, Anna finds herself wondering—the more traditional one, deployed on Baronesses and the occasional well-placed chambermaid; the one he uses when he’s not wooing an idealistic child who really knows better, but has asked him to pretend with her that she doesn’t? “While some things are best left imagined, I don’t believe this is one of them. Do you?”

Anna shakes her head, hotly. All the usual knots in her are coming apart, like they always do, but another one is also forming, tightening, and that is new. It feels good.

“Then it won’t be,” Hans says. His voice is silken and low, unhurried, and his thumb moves slowly, back and forth, over the ridge of her collarbone. “It’ll take some work, I imagine, for it to even come close to what you and I are both capable of imagining. To be worth the _effort_ ” —his hand leaves her neck, strokes down the front of her throat, slowly— “of making reality. But I know you’ll try hard for me. Won’t you, Anna?”

She closes her eyes, face burning; feels feverish and suspects it is only partly out of illness. “Yes.”

“Good girl,” Hans says. “Now open up.”

He tilts her chin and Anna does, blindly. After a moment, metal touches her teeth, and then she tastes the strong, oily bitterness of the tincture and almost spits instead of swallowing. Anna opens her eyes as Hans slides the spoon free.

“That’s cheating,” she hears herself saying, before embarrassment has a chance to kick in, “I thought—”

Hans is smiling. A strand of sunlight has made its way in through the French windows, revealing a shimmer of dust in the air in front of his oddly pink cheeks.

“Yes?” he prompts, rhetorically. “It’s eight in the morning and I’ve a full day ahead; what exactly did you think?”

Anna bites back a number of ill-advised retorts and forces herself to exhale instead, long and deep. She can almost feel the pulse slowing in her wrist. Hans watches her for a minute, transparently relishing what he sees, before he stands up, straightens his crumpled vest, and begins the process of replacing the tincture in the medicine chest again.

“When?”

Even Hans isn’t cruel enough to ask _what_.

“When you’re better,” he says, without looking around. “When your throat doesn’t hurt anymore.” His posture almost seems hesitant. “I hadn’t intended to mention it in this way. You really do have a way of disrupting my plans.”

“Sorry,” Anna says, perfunctorily. She feels warm all over, and also, frustratingly, a little bit sleepy. “What _is_ your plan?”

Hans does turn his head at that, his face betraying trace amusement. “Currently, to survive my head of staff’s attempt to bore me to death with an update on the state of the eastern wing and a detailed account of how the rains have affected kitchen restocking.”

Anna pouts, settling back into the pillows. “You _know_ that’s not what I mean.”

He comes back over to the bedside, a sheaf of papers under one arm. “Take your medicine,” he says, looking down at her. “Three doses at noon, and three again when I come back this evening. It will make you sleep, but sleep is what you need. Sleep, and rest, and time for your body to heal.”

Somehow, Anna’s eyes have fallen closed. She opens them again and does her best to glare. “ _Hans._ ” 

From this angle, his face looks unnaturally long, and sharper even than in profile. Anna tries to pull him down with waterlogged limbs, but Hans just looses her arms from around his neck and leans down to tuck her in. As he straightens, he brings a thumb up to her mouth; to the small, sticky point of wetness Anna can suddenly feel in the corner of her lips, caught in the soft fur of her skin. Hans moves his thumb across it, swipes, and dips just the slightest bit in, not quite to her teeth, but just enough that she can taste it: the tincture, and his skin. The tincture is bad enough that she recoils without meaning to, but his skin is warm and salty.

“A work in progress, then,” Hans says, musing. He musses a hand through her hair, tucks tidily behind both her ears. Perhaps she is already dreaming. “Take your medicine, and recover before Sunday, and you’ll find out exactly what I have in mind.”

Heat crawls across Anna’s cheeks, prickling. She is burning up with it, with fever, with the idea of getting better, before Sunday; healing her body enough for them to discover what new things she can give him; what new part of her he can make his. She had imagined, foolishly, that their arrangement had a static kind of definition, that she already knew the fullness of what he wanted, and of what she had to offer him. Love and devotion and dependence, but now also this, maybe: pleasure, and passion. It was funny, really: for all her storybooks, Anna had never truly imagined herself as the girl in the tower. She had always been the knight errant, the adventurer; a container for passion, overflowing—not its recipient. The potential for Hans to _need_ , even for a moment, even in this singular sense, even just a fraction as much as she does— 

Anna sleeps, and dreams, and heals.

**Author's Note:**

> I essentially have a thousand and one half-written things for all my various Hans/Anna verses - a few more for this verse (including one where they actually first strike their little deal, one where you get a continuation of "holding my chin up" with bizarre handwriting porn, and one that continues this and sits in some uncomfortable is-this-sex-or-not territory while simultaneously being, by my Puritanical standards, pretty filthy) and a few more for the Terrible Gaslighting AU verse, too. I'm also still writing "and its Fragments," though that's advancing slowly...and then I have a scattering of random one-offs about Hans and Anna doing things - going hunting! having children! ice-skating! - that I still hope will someday see the light of day, even if I'm not sure where they belong yet.
> 
> TL;DR: I'm still haunted by this ship!!! Please message me about it to rave about it any time!!!!! And of course, thank you for reading, and - most important of all - I apologise.


End file.
